The rousing words uttered by JFK in a speech delivered in West Berlin in 1962 the year after the Soviets built the Berlin Wall.
Berlin was the capitol of Prussia and eventually capitol of a unified Germany in the 19th century. In the 20th century Berlin occupies a pivotal point in world events. Firstly the end of WW1 sees the overthrow of the German monarchy and the declaration of the short lived Weimar Republic.
In 1933 an Austrian demagogue named Adolf Hitler assumed the Chancellorship in Berlin and set about establishing the dictatorship known as the 3rd Reich. It was from Berlin that he ordered the invasion of Poland in 1939 that started WW2. It was from Berlin that he put orders into place that resulted in the Holocaust. In 1945 in an underground bunker in Berlin he suicided as the allied forces rolled in.
The division of the spoils of war among the victors saw Berlin become an enclave within communist East Germany. A city divided between east and West. Half behind the iron curtain half administered jointly by the US, France and UK. Ultimately to stop the haemorrhaging of citizens from east to west, East Germany built the Berlin Wall in 1961. This became the physical face of the “iron curtain” and the decades of the “cold war”.
Subsequently in 1989 the first sign of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Another US president at the time Ronald Reagan uttered the famous words “Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall!”
